“The Liars’ Club” (post 3) by Mary Karr (post 7): Child is more vulnerable due to alternate personalities developed in response to previous trauma

Multiple personality is a psychological defense that begins in childhood as a way to cope with traumatic experiences. Alternate personalities may enable a child to wall off and segregate overwhelming feelings, and, through compliance, avoid being killed by a much stronger perpetrator.

The downside of this defense is that those kinds of alternate personalities may make the person easier to victimize in subsequent assaults.

In the following quotes from The Liars’ Club, I have put relevant parts in bold face. They appear to refer to the feeling, of being marked as a certain type of person, coming from; the voice coming from; and the tears coming from, one or more alternate personalities that the person senses inside her.

“I get sick one day and the grown man who allegedly comes to care for me winds up putting his dick in my eight-year-old mouth…I’ve stayed home from school, really sick with a fever…I’m…in my room reading Charlotte’s Web for the hundredth time…[She is so excited to tell about the story, like she would have told her father, that] I shout downstairs through the open door for my sitter to come up a minute and get a load of this…I remember so much that I think Daddy would be proud of my telling. My sitter nods all slow and serious. At the end, he says how being special friends with somebody keeps you from ever being lonesome. And do I want to be his special friend?” (1, pp. 239-241).

Various things go through her mind as the baby-sitter exposes himself and coerces her; including, “I think of that old neighbor boy laying me down…him on top of me bucking. Probably I don’t even have a cherry form that. I didn’t hear it pop inside me…Whether I have a cherry or not, though, I can feel how marked I am inside for being hurt that way…” (1, p. 243).

As the baby-sitter’s penis approaches, “Somehow a small voice rises up from my belly and asks that dick all whispery not to hurt me” (1, p. 244).

“Then for no reason, his hands clap down on the back of my head. All care and gentleness go out of him. I sense that even the voice has gone out of him. Which puzzles me, for I’m doing the best I can here. I haven’t even cried boo-hoo crying, though tears are streaming down my face. But I’m not making any noise or sobbing, or calling out, so these tears seem like somebody else’s, the tears of a different girl…(1, pp. 245-246).

1. Mary Karr. The Liars’ Club (A Memoir). New York, Viking, 1995.